hist 210 The Early Middle Ages, 284–1000, Lecture 16 - The Splendor of the Abbasid Period

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hist-210: The Early Middle Ages, 284–1000

Lecture 16 - The Splendor of the Abbasid Period [October 31, 2011]

Chapter 1: The Rise of the Abbasids [00:00:00]

Professor Paul Freedman: OK, in 743, civil war started within the Umayyad my family over the caliphal succession. This war broke out in Persia, which is a little unusual because until this point the subversive, discontented, proto-Shiite region had been what is called Kufa, basically southern Iraq as it now is.

It's thought that this revolt against the Umayyads had the support of the mawali. And it makes sense that if it was in Persia, the largest non-Arab Muslim country, it makes sense that you would have the most [correction: largest] concentration of non-Arab Muslims, that is to say converts or the descendants of converts, who might feel that the egalitarian promises of Islam had been betrayed and that in fact the religion was an Arab one in which non-Arabs were in a subordinate position.

The non-Arab Muslims of Persia had converted, some from Christianity, most from Zoroastrianism, a religion of central Asia. Wickham takes issue with this. If you go back to your reading, pages 292-294, he says that he doesn't think that the discontent was related to somehow the Umayyads being an excessively Arab, rather than Muslim, dynasty or that they provoked discontent among recent converts. So this is an open question. I think there's got to be some Mawali discontent, but as we've seen already there's plenty of discontent: Shiite-Sunni being the most obvious, inter-tribal, regional, problems of holding this empire together. At any rate, in 749-750, the Umayyad caliph was deposed by a member of another family known as the Abbasids.

This new caliph, Abu'l Abbas, Abbas – the Abbasids. The Abbasids were early followers of Muhammad, although not particularly heroic ones. The family had been supporters, but hadn't taken very many risks. So the Abbasids are not heroes, though they are an old family. The Abbasids came to power with support from the Shiites. This is what Wickham means by what he calls their "salvationist theology"; salvationist meaning that they were going to restore the religious fervor that the Umayyads had dissipated. So that they were originally supposed to represent a return, a reformation, of Islam to its austere roots in which the caliph was a modest, clean-living, austere figure.

They very quickly, if that was the hope of the Shiites, the Abbasids very, very quickly betrayed this. They moved their capital from Damascus, the Umayyad capital, to a new city that they constructed in the desert, Baghdad. A city built in concentric circles as a planned round fortress city, but also a commercial city and, of course, predominately city of administration. It was located thirty miles from the old Persian capital.

The Persian Empire was ruled from Ctesiphon. Relocating the capital of the caliphate to Baghdad has a number of obvious implications. While most historians would not be quite as confident as Peter Brown, whom you're reading for Wednesday is, that this represents the “Persianization” of the caliphate, it is certainly true that moving the capital to modern Iraq, to the Mesopotamian part of the former Persian Empire, orients the caliphate further to the East. It changes the center of gravity of the caliphate from the Mediterranean, as in Damascus, basically to Persia, India, the lands between them, modern Afghanistan, Pakistan. At least those are as important, if not more so now, than the Mediterranean.